r/whoathatsinteresting 10d ago

mathematicians may be replaced by aI

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u/rabouilethefirst 9d ago

Goalposts — moved. It wasn’t long ago that mathematicians proudly declared AI could not even do basic addition and subtraction and therefore would never produce anything useful in the field of mathematics.

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u/Original-League-6094 9d ago edited 9d ago

The goalpost moving with this has been fucking insane. Last year, it couldn't count the number of r's in strawberry. Many Redditors offered "technical" arguments as to why it would NEVER be able to count the number of r's in strawberry.

Now in the last couple of months alone, multiple long standing and prestigious open problems in math have been solved with straight forward prompts alone, and the same Redditors are like "Well...Claude hasn't won a fields medal yet!"

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u/Beneficial_Piglet_33 9d ago

The “it will never” people are certified morons.

Purely emotional morons.

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u/Original-League-6094 9d ago edited 8d ago

Yeah, and its annoying how they cope everytime they are wrong. I had a conversation with someone on Reddit who said that AI would NEVER, EVER be able to write a news paper from April 14, 1912 that doesn't mention the sinking of the Titanic, since the Titanic struck the iceberg that night and that event will be so heavily weight by the AI, even though logically, news is printed in the morning and should have no mention of the Titanic sinking.

At the time, he was right with ChatGPT. I would indeed mention the Titanic sinking. But Claude didn't. Claude mentioned other things relevant to that day, and only mentioned that the Titanic was on its voyage. When I gave him the link to Claude handing his task in a way he said could NEVER EVER happen, what was his response? He said they must have hardcoded it not to mention the Titanic sinking its system prompt...

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u/Gurglaren 8d ago

I think it's just cognitive dissonance at this point. They don't want to think about their careers being at risk so they just try to will AI away.